Evil in life (from “Life More Abundantly”)

Wednesday, October 16, 2019

Shall we do more headlines, this morning?

We can try. You will find this easier, and harder, than our usual plodding. Let’s see how it goes.

When we speak of evil, remember that we refer not to appearance of evil, nor personal preferences rooted in one’s values, nor things that seem evil until seen in greater context. Beyond all these categories, there is real, objective, evil, the twin to real, objective, good.

We know that many people have argued that evil is only appearance but it is not so. In a binary universe, good is paired with evil, and the fact that many things that are not evil are called evil does not change the fact that some things are evil, and you know it in practical life, even when your philosophic position or your intellectual preference would argue it away.

Yes, this is ground many times gone over.

Well, it is important, for if all choice is a matter only of personal preference, then values hang in the air, anchored to nothing, and then life would be, in truth, the meaningless arbitrary game it sometimes appears to be.

• The basis of life in duality is good v. evil in tension.
• Like all 3D phenomena, these are realities of the larger All-D reality, manifesting in 3D’s special circumstances.
• It isn’t that you are born ignorant; you are born with tendencies and preferences and potential.
• Life is thus not a school but a chance (and a necessity) for you to choose what you will manifest. It is boot camp in that you are being forced by circumstance to develop and use certain skills. It is a gymnasium in that it provides you an environment in which to exercise them.
• Life in 3D is not isolated from life in the greater sense, no matter that it appears to be so.

Are we divided into armies or families that are good or evil, or all we all a mixture?

Both, at the same time.

Can we change sides with different incarnations? I seem to get, immediately, that as our mixture of elements varies by incarnation, the answer is, “It can be so.”

Again, look to your spiritual and religious traditions. You needn’t be bound by their rules nor pledge your allegiance to them as corporate bodies, but you would be foolish to ignore so large and well-examined a body of information.

I take that to say that we are mixtures of good and evil; that we often do evil almost against our own will; that we are sometimes tempted; that one on either path may be seduced from it into the other.

The left-hand and right-hand path aren’t quite the same as evil v. good; closer to selfish v. all-encompassing. But close enough. In practice, you will find temptation enough on all sides, and even the lure of being all good may be a temptation from the proper path of wholeness. Any one of you is a mixture of prior individuals who were mixtures of qualities.

If our mixture in this life were merely mixtures of qualities per se, life wouldn’t be nearly as rich as it is. I, having 10 other “past” lives, say, have 10 definitely-formed rocks in the bag. If I had only the sum of the qualities they encompass, it would be a bag of sand.

Less structured, correct, and not a bad analogy. Your lives are more structured internally than you sometimes realize. More headlines:

• “Past” lives and psychological complexes are often the same reality differently described.
• “Past” lives, remember, are not finished, completed, polished, portraits or statutes. They, and you, interact.
• That interaction takes place seemingly in 3D, actually in All-D, and the difference is significant.
• The 3D is for choice in constricted circumstances; it is for shaping, or let’s say for self-shaping. You are the spindle and 3D is the lathe, only in some respects the spindle operates the lathe it is being shaped by.
• But 3D is not an end in itself. It is a means toward an end, not “3D life for 3D life’s sake.”

It is not a meaningless show, nor an illusion without substance, though this does not mean that you can see it clearly. Perhaps we might call it reality veiled by illusion.

So give us some more headlines about good and evil.

That might mislead, because larger subjects easily tend to float in midair, slipping away from practical concerns and becoming just mind-play. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not what we are after.

So then how do you anchor the subject?

In human conduct, always; in human experience inner and outer.

So, for instance?

• Anything you are ashamed to admit may or may not be evil (it may be merely social conditioning), but it is the first place to look.
• Things that you know are evil but that you feel within you do not convict you of evil; they convict you of being human. No one can live in duality without incorporating some of the evil in the world. But: Do you express it? Do you consent to it? Do you identify with it?
• If you say to yourself, “Evil per se does not really exist,” into what category do you place torturing animals, children, other innocents, even the guilty?
• Some of life is a choice of values, but other aspects are a choice between real evil and real good, or at least between real evil and neutrality.

We’re going to meet resistance on this point. I can’t quite see why; The same people who deny the existence of evil usually (in my experience) would never dream of committing it.

And there is your clue. It is in the imagination of evil that you can see the potential in real life, just as with any other manifestation.

I think you just said, it is important somehow that we form an active picture of the existence of evil.

In its absence you cannot form an accurate idea of life. The Transcendentalists tended to wave it away – but then the question of slavery hung in the air to remind them that life trumps theory.